by Erin Somers, Harper’s Magazine:
“The days of cultivated meat as a possible panacea for climate change are long gone. Many of the industry’s biggest players—the ones still in business, anyway—are now embracing a more modest role in our food system. Since I tried its meatballs earlier this year, Mission Barns has announced a new strategy: it is pivoting from retail to wholesale and developing new products that will combine plant protein with conventional pork fat—to be replaced by their own, cultivated fat only once they’ve achieved a certain scale.
Elsewhere, cellular agriculture is being used to create exclusive novelty items that could be fairly described as Frankenmeat, whereby their freakiness and limited availability are not liabilities but rather the selling points. Vow, the Australian company behind the mammoth meatball, has also developed a variety of Japanese quail foie gras as part of its objective to craft meats ‘unconstrained’ by ‘the limits of nature.’”
Why, one might wonder? No real reason, except that they can.
Editor’s Note:
First, this story needs a correction. Mission Barns’ CEO Cecilia Chang told Harper’s Erin Somers that “cell-cultivated meat is usually organic and antibiotic-free.”
1. Cell-cultivated meat is never organic. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program doesn’t allow cultured cells to be used in organic food.
2. Cell-cultivated meat is rarely antibiotic free, as labs typically use antibiotics to keep cell cultures free of bacteria.
Second, while it is very satisfying to read Harper’s article about the demise of the lab-grown meat industry, lab-grown meat is something of a red herring. Lab-grown meat captures all the attention, but synbio foods made from genetically modified fungal and bacterial microorganisms (the industry calls this “precision fermentation”) have entered the food supply with virtually no consumer awareness.
Impossible Burger’s fake blood, the Every Company’s imitation egg whites, and Perfect Day’s faux whey protein are GMO ingredients that aren’t labeled and are cheap enough to give companies an incentive to replace the real thing. Their use isn’t transparent, so we don’t know where they’re ending up, but we’re concerned that they could be picked up by the food service industry and snuck into school meals, as soy-based meat-replacers were in the 1970s.
While legislators have moved to ban lab-grown meat in several states, they’re letting these other new GMOs slip by them.
